The COMPAIR project, achieved 15 out of 15 during the European Commission proposal review process and is set to be funded under the topic... 'Enabling citizens to act on climate change, for sustainable development and environmental protection through education, citizen science, observation initiatives, and civic engagement' (LC-GD-10-3-2020).
COMPAIR stands for Community Observation Measurement & Participation in AIR Science. The innovation action is designed to bolster citizens' capacity to monitor, understand, and change their environmental impact, both at a behavioural and policy level. It unlocks the power of the wider public, including people from lower-socio economic groups, to provide broad granular data around a central theme of air quality, complementing and improving the quality of official datasets and making new information useful for research purposes, policy making and behavioural change.
The project will achieve its aim by empowering people in a CS Lab environment - with a special focus on women, young people, and hard-to-reach groups - with the skills to co-design and undertake environmental scientific experiments around needs and challenges in their locality. By providing innovative, self-assembly, low-cost sensors, dynamic dashboards, and augmented reality tools for collecting, visualising, and extracting actionable intelligence from data, anyone regardless of their background, can understand their impact on the environment and explore immediate actions to improve it. Beyond helping to mitigate bad environmental habits at an individual and community level, CS (Citizen Science) data will also be used to mutually enrich other public and private data sources in official city decision making platforms such as public sector digital twins. Thereby helping to increase civic engagement and influence more effective long-term environmental policy.
Tested in the Region of Flanders, and the cities of Athens, Berlin and Sofia, COMPAIR communities, businesses, researchers and public administrations will, for the first time, adopt and benefit from a technology-enabled, collective approach to evidence gathering that fills gaps in existing data sources, and provides new routes to innovation. COMPAIR will raise awareness of, and provide a CS Lab Toolkit, to ensure Citizen Science is a trusted approach to tackling complex, systemic, environmental problems which require different perspectives and collaborative thinking to deliver transformative and repeatable solutions.